- 137
John Wells 1907-2000
Description
- John Wells
- Winged Landscape
- signed and dated 1952 on the reverse; also signed, inscribed with title and dated 1952 on the stretcher
- oil on canvas
- 40.5 by 61cm., 16 by 24in.
Provenance
Wills Lane Gallery, St Ives, whence purchased by the present owner
Exhibited
New York, Durlacher Gallery, John Wells, 1952
St.Ives, Tate Gallery, John Wells, 1998, no.35, illustrated in colour in the exhibition catalogue.
Catalogue Note
According to an inscription on the reverse and in line with his usual practice, John Wells appears to have reworked passages of this picture in 1965 and 1989.
Along with several other St.Ives artists, including Frost and Mitchell, Wells worked as a studio assistant to Barbara Hepworth from 1949-1951, and his work of this period develops a number of ideas that combine the constructivism of Gabo and Hepworth’s own growing interest in natural and landscape forms.
Winged Landscape is an unusually ‘hard-edge’ composition for the early 1950s and prefigures the geometrical yet romantic rendition of landscape that appears in paintings such as Vista 1955 (Private Collection). As in earlier pieces, such as Sea Bird Forms and Aspiring Forms of 1950 and 1951 respectively (both in the collection of the Tate Gallery), the sense of floating movement is retained, but the palette and the orientation of the forms break down any immediate sense of representation.